Study: Fewer than half of mobile calls answered

Why aren’t consumers calling?

According to the research robocalls – unwanted marketing calls, usually from bots – are a key reason many consumers aren’t answering calls, especially calls from unknown numbers. Just how many spam calls are consumers receiving? According to Hiya in the first six months of 2019 just over 25 billion spam calls were placed to consumer cells, an increase of nearly 130% YoY. Not only is that a huge increase but it’s nearly to total for all of 2018, which recorded just over 26 billion spam calls for the year.

“It should come as no surprise that the pervasiveness of spam calls is having an impact on how Americans use their phones. Now less than one in two phone calls is answered,” said Alex Algard, CEO of Hiya. “At the same time, there’s been a significant increase in pick up rate for calls that are identified as legitimate businesses. This shows that trust in who is on the other end of the phone is absolutely paramount to consumers these days.”

Researchers found that, overall, Americans are now making and receiving about 178 calls per month on their cells, that is down almost 20% since the start of 2019. Of those, 93 are calls received and of those calls that come in 46 are from unknown numbers or numbers that aren’t saved to consumers’ contact lists. How does consumer calling break down?

â–ª 48% of all received calls are answered, 71% of “known number” calls are answered
â–ª 69% of calls ID’d as coming from a business are answered
â–ª Identified calls from businesses last almost 3 minutes (average)
â–ª Calls from contact lists last about 5 minutes (average)

The key takeaway from this? That, like with email, brands should ask consumers to add their numbers to call lists. Or, at the very least, ensure that a business name is associated with the number used to call consumers with marketing messages.